<?php
/**
 * <https://y.st./>
 * Copyright © 2016 Alex Yst <mailto:copyright@y.st>
 * 
 * This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
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 * but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
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**/

$xhtml = array(
	'title' => 'Pretending that my vote actually matters',
	'body' => <<<END
<img src="/img/CC_BY-SA_4.0/y.st./weblog/2016/11/04.jpg" alt="Official Ballot Drop Box" class="weblog-header-image" width="811" height="480" />
<p>
	Current countdowns:
</p>
<ul>
	<li>237 scheme-specific $a[URI]-parsing classes to write and add to <a href="https://git.vola7ileiax4ueow.onion/y.st./include.d/releases">include.d</a></li>
	<li>1 free elective left in my associate degree program</li>
	<li>4 free electives left in my bachelor degree program</li>
</ul>
<p>
	Topics for essays that I want to write outside of school:
</p>
<ul>
<li>How the $a[GFDL] isn&apos;t a free license, and is effectively nonfree even when invariant sections aren&apos;t used</li>
<li>How the telephone number system is screwy</li>
<li>How postpaid mobile plans are bad for customers</li>
<li>How connections using &quot;untrusted&quot; $a[TLS] certificates are more trustworthy than connections without any $a[TLS] certificate at all</li>
<li>The importance of free software</li>
<li>The importance of free media</li>
</ul>
<p>
	I woke up quite a bit before my alarm went off, so I checked on the course registration options.
	I&apos;m still only able to register for three courses, two of which I already took last term and one that I don&apos;t want to take at all! I am not amused.
	I wrote back to my program advisor about the issue, but I doubt that they&apos;ll be any help.
</p>
<p>
	I filled out the paperwork that I received from my boss this morning.
	I was supposed to fill it out yesterday, but between the fact that I wasn&apos;t supposed to hand it in until today and the fact that I was sleep-deprived yesterday, I put it off.
	While I was filling out the paperwork, the reason behind my boss&apos;s decision to use the telephone number instead of my Social Security number as my $a[PIN] hit me.
	While my boss is pretty insistent that they choose my $a[PIN] instead of me, they didn&apos;t have my Social Security number on hand at the moment.
	They instead took the telephone number from my resume because my resume was sitting right there on the desk.
</p>
<p>
	I started working on my <code>cap:</code>-scheme $a[URI]-normalization/validation class, but I quickly started to feel tired again, so I went back to sleep for about an hour until I had to get up for work.
</p>
<p>
	I had a bizarre dream.
	I was doing some shopping for my mother, buying several large, plastic baskets on their behalf.
	If I recall, they were similar to laundry baskets, but the memory is fading.
	On the way out of the store, I got distracted by a series of books set up on a nearby shelf.
	The series seemed to be about a strange baby with extra eyes all over its face; this baby&apos;s image with different facial expressions took up the entire cover of each book.
	It distracted me so much that I nearly walked out without paying, but they checker reminded me.
	At that point, I realized that I wasn&apos;t sure that I&apos;d brought enough cash, and I feared that I&apos;d need to pay with my credit card.
	I hate using my credit card in person because I much prefer cash.
	Cash isn&apos;t tracked so heavily.
	I opened my wallet though and found several twenty dollar bills.
	I remember finding this quite strange because I always carry a wallet full of one-dollar bills, as that gets more instances of my stamp image out there; I stamp all of my bills with the $a[URI] of this website to try to get more traffic.
	These twenty-dollar bills were stamped though, so they must have been mine.
	Once outside, I was at a hospital at night.
	The shop that I&apos;d been in must have been a hospital gift shop or something.
	Now that I&apos;m awake, I find it strange that the hospital gift shop had so many books with a mutant baby on the cover though.
	Outside, I tried to take a photograph of the front of the hospital as my weblog header photograph of the day, but it was too dark to get a clear image.
	My mind also wasn&apos;t rendering the image on my mobile&apos;s camera screen very quickly as I moved the camera (leaving black spots on the edges as the image moved off the other side), which I blamed at the time on my mobile&apos;s camera speed, not knowing that I was dreaming.
	My mobile&apos;s battery ran out of power rather quickly too, and I had to pull out the portable charger that I had on me.
</p>
<p>
	Today was my first day back on the job, and I stopped by the grocery store on the way there.
	I picked up some diced potatoes to cook for lunch along with some gelatin-free gel snacks to share with my coworkers.
	The sore&apos;s become busier that it was when I last worked there though, so the four that I brought weren&apos;t enough.
	I didn&apos;t eat one and at least one of my coworkers didn&apos;t want one, but I&apos;m unsure if the other four all decided to eat one.
	I&apos;d forgotten how thirsty working there makes me, and I&apos;d also forgotten how much working at the pizza dress station hurts my back.
	The thirst isn&apos;t an issue of course because I carry a large, refillable bottle and we have sinks around to refill with.
	I&apos;ll deal with the back pain though; I&apos;m just happy to be employed at all.
</p>
<p>
	On my way home, I found that my promotional Cricket Wireless bag has taken too much damage to be worth using any more.
	The thing quickly fell apart, to the point where I had to tie the straps back onto it, as they ripped off.
	Today though, the seams came apart beyond the point of usefulness.
	I&apos;ll probably need to clear out my regular backpack and start using that on short trips such as my commute again.
</p>
<p>
	I finally decided to sign up for that gratis mobile service program offered to the poor my my country&apos;s government.
	I can&apos;t stand telephone calls, but there&apos;s a high probability that as I hunt for jobs in Sweet Home once we finally get moved, potential employers might write me off without giving me a chance if I&apos;m reachable only via non-telephony methods.
	So many people are hung up on the telephone system, after all.
	It&apos;s become clear that Google Voice isn&apos;t going to serve my needs.
	It offers $a[SMS] service without a telephone, provided that you have access to a telephone during registration, but their voice service requires either the installation of a proprietary program or a telephone with service that they will call to route your voice conversations through.
	Likewise, FreedomPop requires the installation of a proprietary application.
	Without it, only data connection service is available.
	The really stupid part is that free software can serve their purposes, they just won&apos;t allow it.
	I&apos;ve read that if you install the proprietary application and allow it to perform some setup tasks, you can take a look at that proprietary application&apos;s configuration to find your actual $a[VoIP] account information.
	From there, you can completely purge the proprietary application and everything that it&apos;s put on the device, then install CSIPSimple (a free $a[VoIP] application) and copy the configuration values into it.
	However, you still need to install that proprietary application the first time because only it knows how to get the needed account identifiers and authentication information.
</p>
<p>
	The gratis mobile service program is offered by two service providers in my state.
	The first one offers more telephone minutes and unlimited $a[SMS] messages, but they&apos;re on a $a[CDMA] network.
	The other offers service over $a[GSM] and $a[CDMA], but offers less voice minutes, limited $a[SMS] messages, and you don&apos;t get to choose whether they send you a $a[GSM] or $a[CDMA] device.
	I took a gamble and went with the sometimes-$a[GSM] provider.
	If I get lucky, they&apos;ll send a $a[GSM] device, and if I get even luckier, I&apos;ll be able to swap the $a[SIM] card into my Replicant device.
	Either way, I&apos;ll have more voice minutes than I&apos;d ever use (Only employers ever call me, and they don&apos;t call that often even when I&apos;m employed; no one else ever even has my telephone number besides my mother, who is obsessed with $a[SMS] but not telephony as much.), and unlimited $a[SMS] is still provided through Google Voice, at least until they decide to erroneously lock me out of my own account again.
	I&apos;m told that my proof of low income was accepted and that my application form will be approved in seven to ten business days.
	After that, I just need to wait for the device to arrive.
</p>
<p>
	I wrote to my school about the course registration that I wrote to my program advisor about this morning.
	Hopefully someone will be able to fix it in time.
	There isn&apos;t much time, either, as my program advisor already had me wait until the late registration period.
	I only have a couple days left to get this cleared up.
</p>
<p>
	Apparently, I was supposed to fill out the health care paperwork and send it back by 2016-11-02; I thought that I had until the end of the year.
	Thankfully, the idiotic $a[PDF] form on the website has been removed.
	Last year, the only way to submit an application for health care online was to fill out a $a[PDF] file in-browser, then hit a &quot;submit&quot; button on the $a[PDF] file itself.
	I don&apos;t know what kind of stupid system that that was, but it made it impossible to submit the form in Web browsers that are built to read $a[XHTML]/$a[HTML] instead of $a[PDF] files, which is probably most of them.
	I imagine that a particular proprietary Web browser plugin was required to make that madness function.
	I ended up having to send in my form via postal mail, then go see someone in person to be sure that my submission even made it in.
	In any case, basic Web forms were used this year.
	As I started the process of filling out the online forms, the website threatened to send me from the state-specific health care website to the national health care website if they decided that I&apos;d do &quot;better&quot; with the national plan, but that fails to take into account certain variables.
	In my case specifically, the national health coverage website maliciously discriminates against $a[Tor] users.
	No matter how much I try, I can&apos;t register for health care coverage through them.
	Even minimal coverage from the Oregon heath coverage website would be better than none if it at least met the idiotic mandatory health coverage laws that are in place here in the United States.
	I don&apos;t register for health care coverage because I want it, I do it because of the moronic law that says that I have to.
	The forms freaked out on me several times, complaining that I&apos;m on a mobile Web browser (which I&apos;m not) and logging me out.
	I imagine that it was logging me out because it was using my $a[IP] address as a session identifier instead of a proper session cookie, but I have no idea why the website thought that I was on a mobile Web browser.
	Normally, I don&apos;t send a <code>User-Agent</code> header, but even when I sent the standard Firefox header, the website thought that I was on a mobile Web browser.
	I ran into one point on one of the forms where the website wanted my employer&apos;s telephone number.
	Idiotically, the website refused to allow my to paste the number into the form.
	I tried editing the source code of the page, but I couldn&apos;t get it to work and eventually typed it in.
	Just as idiotically, if I typed part of the number, then switched to another tab to get another few digits, the form erased the part of the number that I&apos;d typed; the number had to be typed in one go.
	What kind of foolishness is this? Whoever designed this form had no business designing anything for use on the Web.
	Eventually, I got to what I think was the end of the form, and the website says that I&apos;ve submitted it successfully, but it also says that my form still needs to be completed.
	With how badly set up the website is, I really have no idea if my submission has actually been accepted or not.
</p>
<p>
	I filled out and submitted my voting ballot today.
	I know that my vote won&apos;t make a bit of difference, but it&apos;s fun to pretend.
	While I&apos;m on the topic of voting, It&apos;s come to my attention that different states in this country offer voting services via different methods.
	For example, in some places, voting is done in person.
	Here in Oregon, voting is instead done via ballots that are mailed to voters.
	These ballots can either be mailed back using the postal system or they can be dropped off at official ballot boxes.
	The local post office is so close to the ballot drop-off box at city hall though that there was really no point in going to the post office instead and paying for postage.
	The post office was probably closed by the time that I was in that part of town anyway.
	Even if I did have stamps at home though, which I normally don&apos;t even have a use for, it was nice to take a relaxing stroll downtown to drop it off in person.
</p>
<p>
	I helped my mother with a logo that they wanted edited.
	They wanted a modified version of a company logo for their classroom because they thought that the pun that that they were using on the company name was cute.
	Personally, I prefer not to support a company that makes their money off of copyright by making people think of them when they see my stuff, but whatever.
	It&apos;s my mother&apos;s decision, so it&apos;s not my problem.
	My mother was being very picky about the font used though, turning down several fonts that they otherwise liked simply because the letter &quot;a&quot; had a hook on the top, just as the letter &quot;a&quot; has in most computer fonts.
	Eventually, I gave up and had my mother look through the fonts themself, then I cleaned up the rest of the image for them.
</p>
<p>
	I&apos;ve started thinking about the update from $a[PHP]5 to $a[PHP]7.
	The update is already present in Debian Unstable, and once it hits Debian Stable, that&apos;ll be my cue to update include.d to reflect that change.
	For now, I&apos;m continuing to develop on $a[PHP]5 because I know that many people enjoy Debian&apos;s stability.
	As the only fully-free operating system that I know of, I&apos;d really hate to discourage people from using Debian by making my own software incompatible with Debian Stable.
	I really look forward to some of $a[PHP]7&apos;s new features though, such as the new <a href="https://secure.php.net./manual/en/functions.arguments.php#functions.arguments.type-declaration">type declarations</a> that allow you to declare function parameters to be specific types od scalar values, <a href="https://secure.php.net./manual/en/functions.returning-values.php#functions.returning-values.type-declaration">return type declarations</a>, and <a href="https://secure.php.net./manual/en/functions.arguments.php#functions.arguments.type-declaration.strict">strict typing</a>.
	Once Debian 9 is released, you can expect to see every executable file in include.d updated rather quickly.
</p>
<p>
	My <a href="/a/canary.txt">canary</a> still sings the tune of freedom and transparency.
</p>
END
);
